World’s oldest rock art discovered in Indonesia

Indonesia’s vast archipelago is covered with the fingerprints of human history: ancient cave paintings.

But on an island just off Sulawesi, archaeologists have now identified the world’s oldest known example of rock art to date: the outline of a handprint. Using new laser techniques, scientists dated the faded red imprint back to “at least 67,800 years ago”, said the study, published in Nature. That’s about 1,100 years earlier than hand stencils in Spain, previously thought to be the oldest (although that’s disputed).

Crucially, the tip of one finger appears to have been deliberately “narrowed”, researchers say, creating a “claw-like effect” that suggests complexity of thought – and a Homo sapiens artist. The finding adds to growing evidence challenging the “Eurocentric views of ancient intelligence that once dominated archaeology”, said National Geographic.

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A window into the past

The handprint was first spotted in Liang Metanduno, a popular cave on the tropical island of Muna, in 2015. Sulawesi has a “rich history” of palaeolithic art, said The Guardian. But the “ancient hand stencil” had “gone unnoticed” among more recent, eye-catching paintings, being “faded and partially obscured”.

“There’s a lot of rock art out there, but it’s really difficult to date,” said project leader Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia. “When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world. It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”

The stencils were created by “spraying mouthfuls of ochre mixed with water” over a hand pressed flat against the cave wall. When the hand is pulled away, the negative outline is left in the pigment.

Like some other stencils on Sulawesi, the Liang Metanduno imprint has “narrow, pointy fingers”, which the researchers believe was intentional. “Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know,” said Adam Brumm, who co-led the fieldwork on Sulawesi. “But there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them.”

It’s “a complicated thought”, said Aubert. “They are drawing something that doesn’t really exist.”

A new way of thinking

Cave art is “seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways”, said the BBC. It demonstrates “the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science”.

Many archaeologists believed art and abstract thinking “burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there”. They argued for a mental “big bang” in Europe, because cave paintings, carvings and new tools “all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago”. As Brumm said: “When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught.”

But a “new consensus is being shaped”, said the BBC. A series of discoveries in South Africa and Sulawesi has “overturned the old idea” and suggested “a much deeper and more widespread story of creativity”.

We’re seeing “traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art”, in Indonesia, said Brumm. That makes the “Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain”.